


Storyteller

by WraithWriter



Category: Nikolai Series - Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: "Dearest husband; did you know the women of my family can see the future in the stars?", Angst, Anxiety, Based on that convo they had at the start of KoS, Depression, Do I blame that emo asshole in the basement? Yes. Yes I do., F/M, How tf does one tag things, Hurt/Comfort, Nikolai's mental health is suffering, zoyalai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25091776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WraithWriter/pseuds/WraithWriter
Summary: “Did you know, moi tsar, that the women of my family can read the story of a man’s life from the words written on his hands?”
Relationships: Nikolai Lantsov & Zoya Nazyalensky, Nikolai Lantsov/Zoya Nazyalensky
Comments: 8
Kudos: 58





	Storyteller

If it weren’t for the burning hearth, Zoya would have turned and shut the door to the study behind her, leaving to look elsewhere. She, however, was spared, for seated in the near dark was indeed the subject of her search, silent and still with only the flames for company.

"How ominous." Her steps were soft on the polished floors, then over the massive rug that occupied the space before the fire. "Taken to lurking in the dark now, have you?"

Jacket long since discarded, he sat with forearms braced to his knees, shirt rumpled and unbuttoned. The edges of the starburst scar were just barely visible under the fabric, reaching up and towards his collarbone. Nikolai glanced only briefly to where she now stood, half perched on the sofa's rolled arm. "I'm not lurking, I’m sitting. Admittedly, alone. Coincidentally, in the dark."

"I'd call it semantics, but I'm afraid any true distinction escapes me." He only shrugged. It seemed the king was not in one of his more talkative moods, Zoya thought grimly. As often as she complained of his incessant chatter and needless wordiness, she found Nikolai’s silences off-putting. More bothersome was that these moments had become increasingly frequent.

"You missed dinner."  
"I was occupied."  
She eyed the near empty bottle on the low table and the glass held loosely in his hands. "So I see." 

When it became clear he would offer nothing further, Zoya plucked the glass from his fingers, sniffing at the amber liquid with a delicate wrinkle of her nose. “You hate kvas.”   
Nikolai conceded a single nod before leaning into the plush back of the sofa with a long sigh through the nose. “It does the job well enough.”

He watched as she sipped from the glass, a dark brow arched. "What is it, Commander? Have you come to yank me from my melancholic reverie?" Had he grown irritated by her thinly veiled prodding? _Good_ , she thought. She would readily trade annoyance for quiet for as long as possible.  
"That depends. Is this melancholy of the self-pitying type, or more of the all-consuming depressive variety?" It was as much a jest as true concern - or, at least, as true as that infamous ruthlessness would allow.  
Nikolai turned again to the writhing curls of flame. He found that the fire burned less than her searching stare. "Mayhaps I've allowed myself a hearty helping of both."

She was silent for a long moment. So long that he would have said she'd vanished into the shadows, could he not make out the jewel-toned blue of her _kefta_ at the corner of his eye. To his credit, though, Nikolai did not start when Zoya finally settled on the ornate carpet at his feet, crossing her legs beneath her and running fingers over her pilfered glass.

When he only looked at her with slightly raised brows, she took a steadying breath.  
"Genya likes to say that some hurts are better healed by words than medicine. I've argued otherwise, but I figure she would know." Zoya stared intently into the glass between her hands. The implied offer felt foreign, even under the shelter of so many words.

She was beginning to think he would remain silent and that she would have to dash herself into the fireplace for being so foolish as to think he would soften before her. But Nikolai scrubbed his hands over his face just then, the short laugh issued from his lips deeper and darker than the pure sunlight she'd grown so accustomed to.

“I’m tired,” he said, and it was so broken that Zoya's fingers stilled on the faceted crystal.

She had never once heard Nikolai complain of the - frankly, ridiculous - hours they worked. He sat through meetings she found excruciating, smiling and even-tempered. Hell, he joked about the literal demon that shared his skin.  
Seated before him in that moment, his head bent and scarred hands clasped, Zoya felt an indescribable tightness constrict her chest. To Ravka, the man before her was salvation on the horizon, hope for a long-awaited peace. She could not fully understand the scope of feeling that came with seeing that same man driven so low.

“I would be devastated should you ever think less of me, Nazyalensky, but it’s true.” Eyes shut and brows drawn, Nikolai looked for all the world the bearer of skies.  
“I’m so very tired.”  
Zoya knew he was not referring to the type of tired that had left the bruises under his eyes, but something more. She wished she could swipe her thumbs beneath those pools of clearest hazel as Genya did, tailoring away the marks on his soul instead of those on his skin.

Maybe it was that wish that pushed the words from her tongue.

“Did you know, _moi tsar_ , that the women of my family can read the story of a man’s life from the words written on his hands?”

If he was shaken by the turn of conversation, Nikolai did not let on. Despite his recent revelations, the corner of his mouth kicked up. Remembering their long-ago conversation, the night in that carriage on a road to Ivets felt ages away. “I did not.”  
“Oh yes,” she continued, summoning that trademarked imperiousness back into her voice. “And yours is a most interesting tale.”  
Nikolai answering snort was rather un-regal. “That’s one word for it.”  
“Shall I go on, or would you like to keep interrupting?” Her glare was as withering as always, for sympathy was not something either of them dealt in.  
“Apologies, Commander,” he replied, and something thrilled in her at the suppressed smile that tugged at his lips.

When Zoya placed her hands before him, turned upwards, he hesitated only the briefest second before laying his own atop them. Indeed, a book open for her to read.  
Nikolai’s gaze was expectant when she paused, suddenly unsure of continuing what she had begun. The weight and warmth of his hands - all long fingers, fine bones and so very _real_ \- was insistent enough that she forged on. 

She ran her thumbs from the base of his palm over the roughness that spanned nearly the length of each finger before speaking, feeling the skin that had rubbed against coarse ropes and sword hilts alike. “This chapter is long and smells of the sea, whipping sails and endless horizons." Zoya had not known Nikolai during his years as the famed privateer. Even so, she’d have been blind not to notice the way he was drawn to the open ocean, as though a cord ran between his heart and the rolling waves. Their journeys to Os Kervo were few and far between, but always guaranteed him early mornings barefoot on the shore.

Zoya brushed along the callus on his left middle finger, the place where his pen pressed against the skin. She wiped at the traces of ink at his fingernails, the faintest smudge at the heel of his palm. "These speak of a scholar,” she started, a wry smile lighting her words. She thought of the similar smears that sometimes marked his cheek or jaw, the products of particularly furious attempts at confining rogue ideas to paper. “An inventor’s mind too sharp for his own good."

Nikolai’s eyes tracked the way her fingers walked over the cuts and scrapes that crisscrossed natural lines, long since scarred over stark and white. Where he’d fumbled in reaching for the knife in his army-issue boots and sliced his palm open instead. Where shrapnel from a grenatki blast had torn straight through his gloves. Dominik had joked they’d come home looking like they’d been taken clean apart and stitched back together. Some days he truly felt as though he were all seams, kept whole by only threads. "These marks are in the language of a soldier, a boy who saw the good in his country and was willing to fight for it. A boy who became a king with a vision and the power for change." 

She did not imagine that king's shuddering intake of breath when she placed her fingertips on his forearms, where seeping blackness disappeared under shirtsleeves. His pulse was a livewire as she slid slowly back to his hands, stricken as if by the lightning that had found its home in her veins. 

“But this chapter,” Zoya began, ghosting over the lines of shadow etched beneath his skin. “Is the greatest of all.”

Nikolai's laugh had the forced, breathless quality of a man rife with nerves, truly on the verge of learning his fate. How bitterly fitting it was that the woman before him should tell his future. Hadn't he frequently imagined her sharing in it? “Tell me it’s because it has a happy ending.”  
She let her palms fall to rest against his.

“Because it is unfinished.”

When Nikolai at last gathered the courage to meet his general's eyes, there was only blue, infinite and deep. Framed by the burning in the hearth, she truly appeared a Saint - striking and haloed.

He thought of the fairytales he had heard as a child, the legends made reality before his very eyes. _Steel is earned_ , Zoya had said. _So are stories_. How strange it was that history was but a collection of those stories, an endlessly impartial timeline that told nothing of happiness and heartache. It painted flat heroes and villains alike, the ordinary fading to dust. It spooled on an on, woven with faith and destiny and purpose.

“What ending would you write me, Nazyalensky?”  
She lifted her hands from his, tsking, “I am far too gifted a storyteller for such things to be shared so freely, _moi tsar_ .” She glanced away from the way his fingers briefly curled, as if searching in the now-empty space.   
His smile was slight, gone in an instant. “Of course.”

Zoya told herself again that the hollowed look in his eyes was a trick of the flickering firelight and that Nikolai Lantsov was unbreakable.


End file.
